Digital: the new frontier in healthcare

Everything is affected by the digital revolution. The opportunities for improving healthcare could be extraordinary. Interdisciplinary research is key to this. The UCL Festival for Digital Health will connect UCL’s world-class research in computer science, engineering, medicine and health service delivery. Together they can have a direct impact on the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Collaborations across engineering and healthcare will make UCL a leading institution for Digital Health research. Join us to discover new technologies, Share achievements, Network with staff, industry and healthcare and Create new collaborations – a new momentum!

2nd July 2014, 10:30am – 6:00pm

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This one day workshop will discuss the role of social media, crowdsourcing and participatory surveillance for public health in the light of the availability of heterogeneous big data sources providing a constant stream of real time situation-aware data. While the potential to improve health outcomes and provide signals for early warning has been demonstrated, more robust systems integrated with surveillance services need to be developed underpinned with user engagement. This workshop will present existing projects in the domain and discuss strategic directions for the future.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception and an opportunity to network, from 16:30 in the Cruciform Café.

It doesn't just fall from the sky: innovation in eHealth - 30 minutes

Medi+board – the public health dashboard for early warning, risk assessment and response - 25 minutes

Starts: 11:15am Ends: 11:40am

The medi+board is a public health dashboard system screening real-time data sources for early detection of infection threats, cross-validating sources by correlating data streams and displaying results in an integrated format presented by means of an interactive dashboard.

Mobile phones and a growing range of wearable devices allow to sense
human behavior at unprecedented levels of detail and scale, opening up
a new window on health-related behavioral patterns. This talk will
review the state of the art in measuring human close-range
interactions in environments such as hospitals and schools, and will
discuss the potential of high-resolution network data for targeted
interventions, focusing on the domains of infectious disease dynamics
and mental health.

i-sense: mhealth meets global health - 20 minutes

Starts: 1:00pm Ends: 1:20pm

Infectious disease ranks among the top threats to global health. By their very nature, new disease strains emerge every year and outbreaks can spread rapidly, causing enormous losses to health and livelihood. In any outbreak situation, early detection is crucial for effective intervention.

In this talk, I will present our vision to develop a new generation of early warning sensing systems to protect global populations from the spread of deadly infectious diseases-including Influenza, Clostridium difficile and HIV- by linking self-reported symptoms on the web with rapid mobile phone-connected diagnostic tests.

Visualising Movement: Implications for Health - 20 minutes

Starts: 1:20pm Ends: 1:40pm

Most of what we study in cities pertains to human movement and even when we study stable patterns of location, these locations are determined by movements. Movement is like diffusion as as we all intuitively perceive, it is not only wealth and ideas that diffuse with movement but also disease as well as cultural mores pertaining to our we determine out personal health. In short, health depends on our movement patterns. Here we speculate on how a knowledge of movements affects health. We illustrate how health varies with respect to the energy associated with movements such as heat and pollution, how disease spreads according to movement, and how the location of distinct social groups in cities is correlated with health outcomes that in turn are the product of how people migrate and cluster. In our research group CASA at UCL, we are very active in studying movements at different scales from regional migration to local pedestrian movement and movement on transport systems. There are many implications for health from our work and what I will do in this short talk, is illustrate how we might explore some of these from the perspective of the urban scientist and planner.

Public satisfaction with local policing across London - 20 minutes

Starts: 1:40pm Ends: 2:00pm

Citizens who are satisfied with the police are more likely to provide information about criminal activity so as to improve the ability of police officers to control crime and disorder in community. This talk will present public satisfaction with local policing across London and its association with demographics.

The role of citizen science in digital mobile health applications - 20 minutes

Starts: 2:00pm Ends: 2:20pm

What role will participatory sensing and citizen science play in the area of digital global health? From enabling new tools for public health and health professionals, to tools that can support patients and carers, participatory methods can provide new ways of delivering better services around the world. This aspects will be explored, using demonstration from a range of tools that are available today.

Modern information technologies greatly facilitate communication with patients, providing new possibilities for collection of research data and surveillance, and engaging with patients to improve presentation and management of disease. This session will highlight examples in the area of infectious diseases focusing on the MRC/Wellcome Flu-Watch study and the NIHR TB Reach study of Video Observed Treatment for tuberculosis (VOT).

Mobile Implementation of Verbal Autopsy (MIVA) - 20 minutes

Starts: 3:10pm Ends: 3:30pm

This project addresses the need defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) for a mobile device that combines direct capture and analysis of verbal autopsy data to ascertain cause of death for the two-thirds of the world’s deaths that are not registered. This has resulted in the development of a WHO-sponsored app which is being promoted as a method to strengthen routine health surveillance in low- and middle-income countries. Several national governments and international research teams are using or planning to use the MIVA app, replacing a dependency on pen-and-paper methods, lengthy data processes and incomplete cause-of-death information.

When grassroots organisations of the urban poor start discussing food security, the needs and priorities that emerge can be quite different from those that dominate national and global policy discourse. Mapping and enumerating are fundamental tools of urban poor federations to engage with local governments, and balloon mapping extends the co-production of such knowledge.